In moments of conflict and war in the Global South, the diaspora in the West often serves as moderators or arbiters of how events are framed, especially around the justification of ‘regime' change. Many of us looking at this from the West lie in the imperial core. Britain particularly is haunted by the ghosts of it’s past, as Paul Gilroy calls it, Post-colonial Melancholia. Britain misses it’s stronghold on the world, and even though it no longer has the same bearing, it still dictates how the world works. Britain is still living off of it’s fruits from the past, by way of determining what is moral or what is immoral, what is civilised or what is uncivilised. It may not have the firepower it once had, but it definitely does still have the ability to give it’s stamp of approval and the world will listen. I won’t give this now C-list nation too much credit, but it still does get to dictate culture and politics in a significant way. It’s most definitely overhang from colonialism — Britain ruled the largest empire in history, and at its height controlled nearly one quarter of the world’s land surface and more than one quarter of the world’s population.1 Britain had power on a truly global scale because its empire stretched across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East, the Pacific, and North America.2 After World War I, it even held territory in every time zone.3 As militarily powerful, it was also a trade superpower, using imperial control to reach markets in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and beyond. It also gave them major political influence, because it could shape laws, borders, governments, and economies far beyond Europe. We are less than a century into de-colonisation and the fall of the British Empire, so there is still residual impact.
Unfortunately, it is harder to locate and identify that residual impact, as it has fossilised itself into the fundamental beliefs for many, in Britain, Europe, America and the rest of the World. Ultimately, what Britain says, goes. Even though it is understood by many effected that the British Empire was the single most devastating thing to happen to our people, old habits die hard, so many of us still believe Britain when they give the co-sign. We are in a turbulent time where the powers that be are all up in arms, quite literally. We are seeing many resistance movements happening across the globe, and Empire is responding, for the purpose of maintaining control, and to claw back any power that may have been lost over the past couple of decades. In the West we are not on the front line militarily speaking, though I would argue that we are on the front line in a political/cultural sense. It’s looking at hard power and soft power. Hard power is when a country gets what it wants through force or pressure, i.e. military strength, sanctions, economic punishment. Soft power is when a country gets what it wants through attraction and influence, such as through culture, music, film and fashion, education, diplomacy and values and ideas. With soft power the British government does certainly play a role here in many ways, but after misleading a population through education and false information, the government can step to the side whilst civilians do the work on their behalf.
The US and Israel bombed Iran 8 days ago on the 28th of February 2026, and we are now witnessing the fallout around the world. Tensions between the US, Israel and Iran have been building for some time, and we are now at the climax. But let’s look back through history to understand why we are here today.
The Pahlavi dynasty came out of the ashes of the Qajar Empire, who were in constant battles with the Soviet Union and the Ottomans. The 1921 Persian coup d’etat installed the Pahlavi dynasty, as they were supported by Britain.4 William Edmund Ironside, a British Field Marshall, provided advice to the plotters, which successfully deposed the Qajars. Britain deemed the Qajar government as ‘inefficient’, and Persia was a considerably desirable point in Europe and Asia which everyone wanted to get their hands on. Persia is an ancient site that was one of the great centres of power, and the Achaemenid Empire, under rulers like Cyrus the Great and Darius I, became the largest empire the ancient world had yet seen.5 Its power stretched across a huge area, linking parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe, from Anatolia and Egypt to northern India and Central Asia.
In the interwar period, Britain was growing more and more frustrated and impatient with its foreign projects, as they had just suffered significant losses after the First World War. Qajari Iran had relied heavily on both Soviet and British economic and military support, yet Britain did not feel the fruits of their labour. And that frustration prompted them to support their replacement. Cue Pahlavi Dynasty — the Pahlavi dynasty was created in 1925 and lasted until 1979 when it was ousted as part of the Iranian Revolution, which ended the monarchy and established the Islamic Republic of Iran. Pahlavi welcomed the British into Iran, and in 1941 Britain invaded Iran and took over it’s oil fields, under Pahlavi’s watch.6 This was significant for obvious reasons, as Britain now had control of the lifeline of Iran. Muhammad Mosadegh wins in 1951 as prime minister of Iran in a landslide election, platformed by nationalising Iran’s oil so it’s ownership passes back to the Iranian people. The Abadan Crisis (1951-1954) occurred, after Mossadegh followed through with nationalising the Iranian assets of the BP controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and expelled foreign companies from oil refineries in the city of Abadan.7 On 19 August 1953, Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d’état that strengthened the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. This is known as Operation Ajax, and it was orchestrated by the CIA and MI6, and it was so that the imperial capitalist powers could regain control in Iran. In 1963, the Shah had launched the White Revolution, a top-down modernisation and land reform program that alienated many sectors of society, especially the clergy. Khomeini emerged as a vocal critic and was exiled in 1964 (travelling between Najaf and Paris).8 Upon his return, he supported the kickstart of the Islamic Revolution, which was a series of events that culminated in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, all to place Iran back into the hands of the Iranian people. Let’s recap:
Qajar Empire (1789 - 1925 — friends with Britain but not enough for Britain to have much control)
Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–1979 — friends with Britain and allowed them in through the front door and invited them to take their resources)
Islamic Revolution (1979 - present — closed the door to Britain indefinitely, keeping Iran’s resources in the hands of it’s people)
To bring Israel into the mix, it served Israel to have the Shah in power, for multiple reasons: the Shah was secular, he was staunchly anti-Muslim and repressed and killed many followers of the faith. After Ajax, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and Israeli relations had improved significantly,9 and their cooperation grew, which was viewed favourably by the British sponsors of the Shah, until it was interrupted by the Islamic Revolution. It is in Israel’s best interest for the Shah to remain in power, and we must remember that each actor has an agenda. Let me put it simply:
Britain - power and control
Israel - legitimises it’s existence as a colonial project among its neighbours in the region
Iran (Pahlavi Dynasty) - sponsored by an imperial power that can compete with its Ottoman and Soviet neighbours
Iran (Mossadegh) - nationalism and self-determination ending the exploitation of Iran’s resources by imperial colonialism
Iran (Khomeini) - nationalism, self-determination, and bringing back Islamic values as they were, prior to the Qajars and European expansionism
So far we have discussed our role in the West as moderators of morality, determining what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’; the lead up of events to the Israel-US attack on Iran by looking at political history over the 20th Century which lays out the series of events that brings us to where we are today. How do these things link? In short, Iran has passed through many hands, and lies at the centre of a long struggle for power. And depending on who wins, that determines Iran’s fate. Every empire has used soft power and hard power in tandem to gain supremacy. Together, one secures obedience and the other helps win consent. Britain used hard power through the Royal Navy, armies, and colonial rule to seize and hold territory. It used soft power through English, British-style education, and imperial administration, which helped make British rule feel normal and legitimate across its empire. Rome used hard power by conquering lands, stationing troops in provinces, and ruling them through governors with coercive authority. It used soft power by spreading Roman law, citizenship, and Roman forms of local government, which encouraged elites and communities to buy into Roman rule.10
At this moment, people in the West have a choice to either consent to ‘regime’ change or not. The diaspora have been infected with the lie of ‘modernity’ (residual empire) after being influenced by the West. Western values and ideologies are still seen as ‘objective good’ by many, including the diaspora, which means anything outside of that is flawed. These ideologies are often led by a tall, dark and handsome, and sterile figure who has never committed sins before (being the herald of freedom), and is perceived as morally perfect. Mamdani comes to mind. The diaspora believe in a sterile good and that is only possible because of lies fed by the West. I call this the good vs evil matrix, which is a way of thinking that puts people, actions, or groups into two opposite boxes: absolute good or absolute bad. An easy example of this is the manufacturing of Black and White identities. Simply put, it makes the world feel clear and easy to judge, even when reality is more messy, and complex. A theory is that this is linked to Christian teachings, as they often use strong moral opposites like God and Satan, sin and virtue, saved and damned, light and darkness. Over time, especially in the West, this helped shape a wider culture where people came to see moral life through sharp binaries. Christian ideas influenced law, education, empire, politics, and everyday language for centuries, and it is still present today, in ways that are not immediately clear to us.
First World / Third World can be another example of binary (or in this specific case, “trinary”) thinking, because the Cold War split the world into blocs and made that division feel natural and objective. Originally, “Third World” did not just mean poor countries. It meant countries outside the U.S.-led First World and the Soviet-led Second World, and many of those states were connected to the Non-Aligned Movement, which was formally established in 1961. The Three Worlds Theory makes up the basis of our worldview here from the West. So that is to say that any entity that does not have the perceived sterility of the First World is deemed evil. This is what we mean when we refer to a ‘colonised mind’. The diaspora are unaware (through manipulation and indoctrination of false notions of freedom) that they live under sterile-presenting democracies, seemingly aiming for moral good and collectivity, but are in fact much greater evils who’s sins far outweigh the Third World entities in question.
And if we focus on the alleged sins of the entity in question, here using the Islamic Republic as an example, they can always be traced back to the greater sins of the empire which the diaspora live under. Many people in opposition to the Islamic Republic object to the current economic condition of Iran, which is as a result of sanctions administered by the greater evils, which are as a result of non-conformity. Iran refuses to conform to the West and comply with their demands, and the US is able to place sanctions on Iran because of the dollar, this is how empire punishes those that do not do as they ask. Leading to economic hardship within the country, even though the US holds no power within. This is how our world works. To conform to the West, a nation threatens its own sovereignty. Since the Iranian Revolution, it has chosen sovereignty, and it is still feeling the consequences of putting its people first.
Economic pressure is a divisive tool from the oppressor, playing puppet master from the outside, creating unrest and tensions within a country, whilst keeping their hands clean. It makes it easier to point fingers and frame this as failure of leadership, especially if one looking at this does not know how geopolitics impacts the global economy. Many of the diaspora, western liberals and leftists approach and focus on the hardships in isolation without acknowledging why the hardship exists in the first place. By their standards of objective good and evil, leadership that is overseeing hardship in a country are to blame and therefore considered evil, whilst being completely unaware of the greater evil that is present but virtually invisible (because of its strategic way of seemingly not having direct involvement, and people buying into lies manufactured by them). The greater evil must be removed first as it is the bigger threat, and only then will we have the power to proceed to look within.
Burkina Faso is another nation that is moving steadily forward in its fight for freedom from European colonialism. In an interview with a local businessman in Burkina Faso11, he speaks about how business has slowed down since their new leader, Ibrahim Traoré, came into power. Traore took power in order to remove Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who was previously in control, which threatened the security of the nation. Under his rule, terrorism escalated and political instability deepened, seeing two coups in one year. To the West, Traoré is dubbed as a ‘dictator’, though on the ground in Burkina Faso, people see things differently:
Interviewer: “What do you think of Ibrahim Traoré?”
Local Businessman: “Ibrahim Traoré has a big heart. He is open, sentimental, and deeply passionate about the future of our country. He is courageous and cares for everyone, rich or poor. Our president doesn’t want us to be exploited anymore and we all want this change. So during this transitional period, it’s understandable that business will be slow, but we believe things will improve. Firstly, we must fight terrorism, we must fight hard. We need to defend ourselves to bring our country back. Of course there will be challenges, pressure is necessary, and people need to adapt. But once stability returns, business will naturally follow. We agree with the president, his leadership, and in the direction he is taking us. We know there will be many challenges in the years to come, and we welcome them.”
Traoré’s strategy has been to push France and other colonial powers out and restore Burkina Faso’s sovereignty. As the interview demonstrates, the country has faced sanctions and a steady Western smear campaign. It has been labeled unsafe for travel, which has hurt tourism, trade, and economic exchange. Many Western liberals and leftists who have never visited Burkina Faso and know nothing of it’s history question the legitimacy of him as a leader for some of the recent laws that have been passed, so are unknowingly consenting and giving the go-ahead for the West to intervene to destabilise his government (every attack on his governance is a co-sign for his removal, whether this is known or not). Burkina Faso, like Iran, has chosen an independent path and has paid a price for it.
Yet many people remain committed to that path. Thomas Sankara, who led Burkina Faso in the 1980s, named it “the land of the upright people.” That idea still carries weight. Many Burkinabè see hardship as part of the struggle for peace and dignity, and they accept that sacrifice as part of rebuilding their country. These measures are seen as part of restoring a nation shaped by centuries of colonial rule.
Many believe these scenarios can be approached with ‘nuance’, and the trending rhetoric manufactured by liberal academia, that 'two things can be true at the same time’. It is entirely impossible for one to expect Western liberal academics and the diaspora alone to know how to govern such nations, and we must put our trust in the people that are still tethered to the land and who are burying their young as we speak, to know what is best to move forward. They say they are fighting for liberation, but liberation from what? After watching the discourse around liberation and decolonisation unfold, I have come to question whether their idea of liberation matches the reality faced by people living under colonial pressure. If liberation truly meant freedom from the coloniser, support for the resistance would follow naturally. So the question remains: if you refuse to stand with people resisting Western colonial domination, what exactly is your aim?
As voices from the resistance are trying to be heard, the conversation keeps being pulled elsewhere. The focus shifts again and again to the faults of the resistance itself, when staying on track and defeating the oppressor should be our only aim in this moment. That raises a serious question about who this serves.
If the resistance is fighting for the people, then those attacking the resistance have placed themselves on the other side.
Liberals and much of the left keep returning to the language of nuance, while the Iranian resistance faces the force of the US, Israel, and Britain on the front line.
This perceived nuance that they believe they are applying to the country’s governance is actually contradictory. They are asking for a ‘regime’ change, meaning the Shah will come into power, which they believe will be the solution for the hardships in the country, i.e. lifted sanctions. But we have looked at the role the Pahlavi Dynasty played in Iran between 1925-1979, and so by looking to the past we know exactly what will happen with this ‘regime’ change, it is no secret. They murdered Muslims, oversaw secret police repression (SAVAK), political imprisonment, and not to mention a lot of Iran’s new oil money benefited the crown, the court, and well-connected elites, while many ordinary people were shut out. In the 1970s, heavy state spending and the oil boom helped drive high inflation, so even with growth, many Iranians felt everyday life was getting harder. The state also tightly controlled political life and prevented the creation of independent organisation (such as unions), which meant workers had weak protection against exploitation or unfair conditions. Arguments are made that the Islamic Republic doesn’t allow for other political party presence, therefore causing them to be seen as ‘totalitarian’. I guess I would ask, how have we benefitted in Britain with our numerous parties? One could argue that by having the options available is democratic, providing choice. But I would argue, and I think many would agree, that this format is unproductive. How is Britain looking politically today with its 408 political parties12 (jumping from 393 recorded in 2024 by the Electoral Commission)? But that’s democracy, right? And after all, by Western standards, democracy is always morally superior to any other form of governance.
And this brings me on to my next point — liberal universalism is a tool of neo-colonialism. It is the intuitive belief that Western cultural and political values, masked as ‘universal morals’, apply to the rest of the world.13 Acknowledging the centuries of European colonialism that we have explored, and the resultant economic hegemony of today, we understand how these values spread and have maintained themselves. The framework amplifies the opinions of a minority in many of these targeted nations (e.g. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Nigeria, etc.) and invalidates everyone else. To judge Iran by Western standards and what should and shouldn’t happen is colonial and unrealistic, as it is the imposition of one’s own standard onto another. When knowing it’s vast history across the centuries as one of the greatest centres of power in the ancient world, and the attempts of the Ottomans, Soviets and British to gain control of it, it makes sense for such a nation to adopt relatively ‘conservative’ forms of governance, as an attempt to keep external intervention at bay. Dissident voices who support external intervention are as much a threat to the nation as the external parties themselves. Someone that has the same goals as a Zionist makes them a Zionist. And Empire has gotten really good at changing tact — they will tell you current leadership is evil, and present you with an alternative that is seemingly ‘good’, that they will make things better and use words and concepts that are familiar to you (trying as best they can to speak your language), ultimately fooling you — think of the vampires in Sinners (2025). The Shah is promising female liberation from the ‘repression of the Islamic Republic’, however, under Reza Shah, the state implemented the Kashf-e hijab (unveiling) decree in 1936. This caused women to refrain from appearing in public, not being able to attend school, and ultimately threatening many women’s lives. So in response to the claim that with the Shah in power would improve quality of life for women, I ask simply, which women? Because the safety of Muslim women is most definitely not secured under the Shah’s control. Further the following interview with Barbara Walters in 1977 demonstrates his views of women14:
Walters: “You don’t feel that women are in that sense equal, that they have the same intelligence or ability…”
Pahlavi: “Not so far, maybe you will become in the future…but on the average, I repeat again, when have you produced top scientists?”
Walters: “Do you feel your wife is one of these rare exceptions?”
Pahlavi: “I prefer not to answer.”
Unfortunately, many who have the loudest voices today, are unaware of how the enemy presents itself. It will show up claiming to be ‘freedom’, but we rarely interrogate ‘freedom’ for who? Freedom is not objective. “We’re not free until we are all free”, another overly used trending rhetoric — it completely bypasses people, systems and ideologies that exist in direct contradiction to one another. A Zionist considers the death of Palestinians freedom; a white South African considers the ownership of land as freedom which represses Black South Africans; a racist in Britain is free when a person of colour is not. So tell me again, how can we all be free? It is a logical fallacy.
So I guess, one could say, it is all down to who or what you worship. What do you consider as freedom? The Islamic Republic condemns the Epstein class of capitalist imperialism, and they reject the Israeli colonial expansion. Ibrahim Traoré is doing everything within his power to barricade the door shut to the West, to resist their control. These are much greater evils that they are fighting that must be kept at bay at all costs, to preserve the safety and security of their people. Again, we now come back to whether we consent for ‘regime’ change, or not. The least we can do in the West is to not publicly talk down or oppose the resistance. The empire does not care what your reason is for ‘regime’ change. All they need is your consent. And your consent looks like opposing the resistance to empire. There is space for nuance and discussion, and there is time for that when the immediate threat is no longer knocking at the door. There is too much at stake, and history spells this out. Discussion requires time for us to make mistakes, come to the wrong conclusions and spend time working towards the truth together. We do not have time on our side. If there was a fire in the corridor, you would not remain in the house discussing how to fix the problem, drastic immediate measures would instantly be taken. The Islamic Republic is the drastic immediate measure to combat Western intervention, and to preserve Iran’s sovereignty. And for Burkina Faso, and Africa as a whole I would say, Ibrahim Traoré is their drastic measure.
I will finish on this quote from Sayyid Hassan:
“You cannot be with Palestine, unless you are with the Islamic Republic of Iran. And if you are an enemy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, then you are an enemy of Palestine and al-Quds (Jerusalem).
Why? This is not a (mere) claim.
Because the last hope that remains - after Almighty God - for regaining Palestine and al-Quds (Jerusalem), is this Islamic Republic and its help and support for the nations and resistance movements of this region, foremost of which is the Palestinian people.”
https://www.britannica.com/summary/British-Empire
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Western-colonialism/European-expansion-since-1763
https://www.britannica.com/summary/British-Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qajar_Iran
https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-achaemenid-persian-empire-550-330-b-c
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abadan_Crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
https://donya-e-eqtesad.com/
https://www.britannica.com/place/Roman-Republic
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/media-centre/political-parties-accept-almost-ps65m-donations-2025